Welcome to CHN

Dear Friends:

Welcome to Community Healing Network. For those of you who are new, thanks for visiting. For those who have been with us on this journey for some time, thank you for your continued support. We are excited to be moving into a new phase of our work at this crucial moment in history.

For the Black community in the United States, these are turbulent times. The current political moment has brought to the surface a bolder, more public White supremacy and anti-Blackness that we haven’t experienced in decades. For those across the African Diaspora, structurally embedded anti-Black racism continues to rear its ugly head in a myriad of ways. With so many crises continually facing the global Black community, we urgently need to get to the root of anti-Black racism and dismantle it from the inside out.

Over the past twelve years, CHN has created an infrastructure to mobilize Black people to heal from the trauma caused by anti-Black racism, and extinguish its root causes. With the help of Dr. Cheryl Tawede Grills, representing our primary ally, the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), we have shared our resources for healing, especially our well-received Emotional Emancipation Circles, across the United States and the African Diaspora, from Cuba, to Trinidad and Tobago, to the United Kingdom, to South Africa, and beyond.

We are building the movement for emotional emancipation far and wide, so that all Black people, everywhere, can move beyond surviving to flourishing. Our commitment is to fearlessly confront what stands in our way, and to work together in love and respect, to break every barrier to our emotional emancipation and our complete freedom.

In October 2018, from CHN’s birthplace of New Haven, we launched our Global Truth Campaign and Tour–to heal, and end, the trauma caused by 600 years of anti-Black racism.

And we are off to a great start!

Participants in the Launch gained a deepened understanding of the trauma of anti-Black racism, its effects on Black children, and the pathway to healing. They learned concrete skills for reducing racial stress and trauma–skills they can share with others to help create a culture of healing and wellness in their communities. And they will have the opportunity to join CHN’s evolving global online community to continue to strengthen their emotional wellness skills and their abilities to be catalysts for healing.

We will continue on the Tour with our sisters and brothers at ABPsi, traveling to key cities across the Diaspora and sharing skills to help Black children “defy the lie of Black inferiority and embrace the truth of Black humanity.”

In August of 2019, the Truth Campaign and Tour will arrive in Richmond, Virginia, where we will host our 2019 Valuing Black Lives Global Summit. There, in the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, we will mark the 400th anniversary of the first forced arrival of Africans in the United States, by issuing a Call to the African Union and the Diaspora to put the matter of emotional emancipation at the top of the global African agenda and by developing plans to strengthen this vital movement in 2020 and beyond. From there, the Tour will travel to Accra, Ghana, in West Africa.

CHN’s aim since its inception has been to engage a critical mass of Black people in the journey toward emotional emancipation—for complete freedom for Black people– by 2019, so that by 2020, we as a people, worldwide, will see ourselves in a whole new light.